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Movement in Duels

Greetings fellow players. I need your advise about movement in duels. For quite some time I've decided to start dueling and eventually to switch to it.

After watching a lot of Zotac/Faceit/etc streams and semipros, I strongly believe that good movement is the master key to success. Watching my demos makes me very sad to realize, I can't do even a simple movement when stressed/bullied/pressured and it costs me nerves and a game.

So the question is, how can one develop good movement and positioning on duel maps, what are the best practices for progress? I understand it is not easy and positioning is one of the hardest thing to master (needs a lot of practice), but movement, something can be done in that direction.

Please don't tell me, I need to just play and it will come eventually. I've played too much dm6 in CA and I can assure you, I'm moving on that map as bad as I moved 1 year ago There must be some alternate way to train movement. Maybe devmap and setviewpos?

Start from scratch. Pretend you've never played the game before. Watch newbie tutorials on youtube. Enable the spedometer.

use (( /cg_speedometer "1" )) - this shows you how fast you're going in a numerical value and graph value. Experiment mouse movements with strafe jumping to see how high you can get it while travelling between two points on a map.

As for positioning, slow the pace down on the map. You can't have positional advantage when being aggressive, unless you're in their face and taking a lot of damage. Use areas of the map where you will be able to hear where the enemy might be. Think of the exits they might choose from that point. Pick the most likely candidate, and commit. If he's not there, he obviously went the other way. Set up a trap. You know where the player is.

Try practicing the specific movements that you're having trouble with. For instance, if it's Bridge to Rail, in Campgrounds, try practicing it until you can feel more comfortable doing it consistently. Also, it could be that your sensitivity is what's holding you back, but I can't instruct you on anything specific to change for that.

After watching a lot of Zotac/Faceit/etc streams and semipros, I strongly believe that good movement is the master key to success.

Don't take this the wrong way but I think you first need an attitude shift, instead of coming up with "strong beliefs" like this for yourself you rather need to take in information from others. Good movement isn't the "master key to success" for everyone, otherwise it would be always emphasized above everything else. Quake Live duel is a very complicated game and there are no easy fixes.

Having said that it may well be a weak part of your own game, other people may have other weak points. As Fatal1ty and others have mentioned, it's often a case of where you should work on the weakest part of your game.

Last edited by quakestreme; 04-15-2013 at 01:37 PM.

Aways ensure you are maintaining a high FPS rate in QL. Otherwise you can be at a big disadvantage. To find out your current fps rate, use the command: "set cg_drawfps "1"".

When this first arose I decided to start practicing the jumps (bridge to rail/rail to bridge/etc.) and realized that they get quite boring fast. The solution for me was to design a map that would help me learn more movement control than strictly speed.

After spending a couple months training and developing this map it allowed me to make bridge to rail and rail to bridge even if I mess up a big part of the jump because I have worked to correct my strafing in mid strafe. I have practiced BR2 and R2B over 1000 times each before trying them in game while shooting during mid strafe. Being able to correct an incorrect strafe also gives you the ability to shoot mid strafe because you can correct the movement after the shot.

This map will in no way guarantee that you will gain good movement, but it helped me and a couple others I know to fine tune movement control. I now make B2R and R2B backwards consistently and can do Raztrainql strafe pad lanes 0-8 but this in no way makes me a pro dueler. It just makes my movement look nice, but my overall aim is still slacking.

@up
I second that, good map there. Raw speed is useless when you have no control over it. Normal aps aren't made of straight corridors with infinite length.

@OP
You could try playing some matches against weak opponents, like this:
- you try to run the map as quickly and smoothly as possible
- when you get into a fight, so be it, but other than that don't focus on combat at all, just have some fun running around and grabbing items
You shouldn't piss your opponent off by putting on too much pressure, so the match should be fine as far as he's concerned. As for you, just strafing around can get boring quickly, but if there's also item timing and enemy tracking to be done, you should be pretty occupied - not too much, though, since your main focus is flying through the map.
Actually, how good is your strafing? Can you show some sample demos? If there's some error in the basics, working on the in-game application won't help much. I'm assuming you already strafe pretty well and just can't seem to make use of it in actual duel situations, but who knows.

quakestreme - I take info from everybody, it is just my opinion, it is what I believe is the most helpful for me. As I play with bit higher latency (around 70), positioning becomes critical for my success.

FrEaKKiLLa - I watched the video, map looks great I will try it out tomorrow.

Pony - My strafing is not good, not at all. In defrag I managed to get some constant acceleration with cgaz visual cues. Here I feel I don't accelerate as fast as there (vq3), still my strafes are bad generally. I notice, that when I flee and spam, or in a hurry to an item, I tend to hit walls or objects a lot of time blocking self or jump and stopping completely

Skimming practice might prove very useful, then. Rather than get blocked by the wall corner, you should be able to fly through it. Try to run through maps skimming as many corners as possible - it really makes you waste a lot less time.
If you feel your strafing in general is bad, there's plenty of practice map in the forums, dcxpracticebeta2 and raztrainql_beta3 are my favourite. QL physics differ a bit from Q3 so your speed will benefit from angle adjustment etc. Worth a try.

One of the things I've done to improve my strafing is to practice fast-captures on all CTF maps. Check the fastcap thread on this forum or check out some Youtube videos and see how quickly and smoothly some people can move from one end of the map to another (Nightmare is really good at it). I found that having a goal (CTF) helped me out a lot and and made it more entertaining than just running items (although this is helpful as well on duel maps). I learned a ton about how to navigate many different maps this way. It has also helped me break out of my own little "box", i.e., be more creative about how you move about. A good video on Youtube shows about 80 different ways to do B2R! Keep practicing! I found that at some point my mouse just starting moving correctly on its own

1) look at strong players routes on maps;
2) try to do the same;
3) if you realize that you don't get much speed there (you need one more jump to get to area) - use raztrainql_beta3, let's say lane 4-5-6. Your goal would be not to complete the lane, but to make 3 first jumps (you rarely have space to do more than that in Duel). After you can do this, get back to routes you've started.
4) there some special moves which can be quite or extremely handy: bridge-to-rail/rail-to-bridge, strafejumping on pillars at YA area (dm6), double strafejump/single circlejump to RA (aero), strafejumping on boxes from RA to tele exit, circlejump to teleport top from YA (tox), drop from RL to RA, doublejump to shards (dm13) and many more - watch tutorials and get familiar with them.